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All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

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151–160 of 437 posts

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#151
post #6
post #3

It's so frustrating seeing nuclear pitted against renewables, while fossil fuel powerplants are still operating/being built, whose baseline power could be replaced by nuclear. But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal.

With renewables baseline doesn’t make sense. Nuclear doesn’t combine well with renewables, not in a way that would complete the picture. Meaning: you can’t build something that works with only those two building blocks. Even more: baseline is not at all needed with renewables. Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide tha…

> can be turned on and off quickly and on demand

Nuclear can be throttled up at most within an hour? Down almost immediately I suspect.

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#152
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing a lot of background on how these markets work. And i'm not remotely qualified to explain them. But, very broadly and simplistically speaking. We are not even remotely close to living in a "We have too much power" world. ( Markets will change drastically then.) All the nuclear supply has already been sold and is being constantly used 100% of the time. It never makes sense to turn off the nuclear power p…

> All the nuclear supply has already been sold and is being constantly used 100% of the time. This couldn't be further from the truth, at least for France: hover over the lower graphs to animate the source upper graph here: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR Every single day nuclear oscillates between 60% and 80%, in strong anti-correlation with wind, solar and border exchanges. With hydro and pumped storage, thi…

If you're at 20% capacity it costs about 5x as much as when you're at 100% capacity. With nuclear almost all the cost is in building (and decommissioning) the plant.

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#153
post #143
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, if you leave the storage cost of the nuclear waste for the next 100.000 years out of your business model.

There’s very little storage cost as the fuel can be burned til there is nothing radioactive left. Nuclear doesn’t produce radioactive materials it reduces radioactivity. If you mix the spent fuel from a heavy water reactor back into the ore, it’s radioactivity will have been reduced.

While you can burn the fuel until very few long-lived isotopes are left we don't do that currently. Nuclear reactors also turn relatively harmless Uranium into much more active elements. Just mixing the waste back into the rocks you got the Uranium from is not a safe storage method.

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#154
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument does not make a lot of sense without detailing which power sources that can turn on and off quickly you are talking about. The only ones I can think of are hydro and gas-powered thermal? So you want natural gas over nuclear? On the other hand, your comment presumes that there is such a thing as too much power. Once hydrolyzers mature, we could use all of the current renewable power in Europe just for pr…

You're missing a lot of background on how these markets work. And i'm not remotely qualified to explain them. But, very broadly and simplistically speaking. We are not even remotely close to living in a "We have too much power" world. ( Markets will change drastically then.) All the nuclear supply has already been sold and is being constantly used 100% of the time. It never makes sense to turn off the nuclear power p…

> We are not even remotely close to living in a "We have too much power" world

Not a "world", but this happens locally in Europe due to wind/solar momentarily producing more than demand. There have been instances with negative prices.

Anecdotally, one mitigation seems to be adjusting the local base voltage to 220V so that peaks due to solar stay below 240V (or something like that).

Nuclear can, at least theoretically, be throttled hour-by-hour over the day to compensate wind, although hydro is probably more cost-effective if available.

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#155
post #6
post #3

It's so frustrating seeing nuclear pitted against renewables, while fossil fuel powerplants are still operating/being built, whose baseline power could be replaced by nuclear. But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal.

With renewables baseline doesn’t make sense. Nuclear doesn’t combine well with renewables, not in a way that would complete the picture. Meaning: you can’t build something that works with only those two building blocks. Even more: baseline is not at all needed with renewables. Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide tha…

That’s just false. Here is an article (in French sorry) showing with real data from the grid how nuclear baseline adapt in real time to renewable production change: https://lenergeek.com/2019/03/07/mix-electrique-nucleaire-tr...

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#156
post #74
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newer data says otherwise. https://twitter.com/mzjacobson/status/1452771074119135237 And variability is easy to deal with: overbuild and/or storage. Southern Australia shows how it is done.

> Newer data says otherwise OK, GLWT. > And variability is easy to deal with: overbuild and/or storage. Southern Australia shows how it is done. Australian energy is 72% fossil fuel, 11% hydro, rest solar and wind. https://www.worlddata.info/australia/australia/energy-consum...

He did say South Australia, which is investing heavily into renewables and battery storage. The thing is that Australia has a huge coal lobby (being one of the biggest producers in the world) and the current conservative government is essentially in bed with them. Incidentally Australia is also one of the biggest producers of Uranium.

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#157
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when the incumbent, fossil fuel energy, has been propped up by subsidies and unpaid externalities for centuries.

Please don’t fall for the villianization that the media adopt to push an agenda. Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish. Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities and hence have been used for ages. We have much to be thankful for thanks to fossil fuels being around. We are in a position today to bring change and I’m all for that. Losing sight of the benefits of energy simply because some sou…

Which part of the statement that fossil fuels have been subsidized directly and by not paying for their externalities is wrong?

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#158
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coal was already in reasonably widespread use in industrial processes 200 years ago, and produced unpaid-for externalities then just as it does now (actually worse ones, presumably, given that air quality was not yet regulated in any meaningful way).

Where’s my citation I asked for? I’m not saying the parent is necessarily wrong, but given the recency of the industrial revolution and the length of time between which it “began” and when many of the most useful industrial applications for coal were discovered, I can’t take it at face value “centuries” is correct. It might be close to correct, it might be technically correct, but it’s not merely an pedantic point: h…

It is very easy to look up the history of coal use and see that it had metallurgical applications in antiquity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#History

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#159
post #14

Read between the lines. It's not about the best solution(s), it's about _their_ solution. Nuclear solves the problem they champion, which means, it negates the need for their efforts and existence (economic). Ironically, the rejection of nuclear as a viable option seems to be the result of a psychological existential threat to the supposed "elite" of our world. The mask is off. Protecting the future of humanity isn't…

The reason nuclear is unpopular is that it is expensive. It's more expensive than coal and gas typically. It's also very slow to deploy. A decade is nothing. We'll hit 2035 when several countries are planning to be 100% renewable powered in about 13 years. That's not a lot of time to build a meaningful amount of nuclear plants. Nuclear plants coming online recently are not great examples of speedily execution on a tight budget either. Despite this, there are still a quite a few under construction (around 50 world wide). It's their financial performance relative to renewables that determines if we end up with more of them.

The word baseload always comes up in these discussions but its meaning never really gets specified in a very satisfying way. For example in GW needed for how long (i.e. GWH). Having such a number would facilitate a discussion about alternate ways how we would get that power more cheaply. That's not a debate nuclear proponents like having because it focuses attention on poor financial performance of nuclear relative to just about anything else.

The simple reality driving a lot of the decision making is that you simply get more GWH per $ with solar and wind. And not just a little bit; the difference is massive. And you get it much quicker too. And it's far less risky from a political point of view.

So instead of getting say 8GW with a very big nuclear plant costing maybe 30-40 billion and taking two decades to get built and planned with lots of uncertainty around the process, you can have 30-40 GW online two years from now for about the same amount of money. That's based on a price of 5000$/kw for recent offshore wind installations. A couple of hundred GW of wind came online over the last few years. The investments in renewables are massive and for good reasons: it delivers results quickly and prices are trending down.

Offshore wind is actually relatively expensive compared to solar and onshore wind. But also relatively reliable. People put solar on their roofs for less (2-3k/kw) and solar plants are even cheaper but of course less stable sources of power. Add batteries to the mix and other forms of storage (ammonia, hydrogen, thermal mass, pumped hydro, etc.) and there is no lack of a "baseload" that can't be planned for and mitigated. It will have a price and a certain capacity and that's what needs to be debated in Glasgow. It's a conference about allocating massive amounts of money in the next decades. The stakes are high both in financial terms and in the outcomes.

Nuclear might be part of this if the price is right. But the whole nuclear or nothing attitude is just not a very productive argument. Many countries that have the option are still doing some nuclear of course. But far less than what they are allocating for wind and solar (in dollars and planned GWH capacity).

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China can build nuclear power plants and indeed is building a large number of them. But as you mention the demand for energy is vast and they can't 'just' get rid of coal.

China's nuclear power plants come from the US. Westinghouse's bankruptcy set back the targets for many years. Of course, the big problem is also geopolitical concerns here. I would say that India is in a better position here (on geopolitics), however the tech transfer from US even to India has been iffy at best. Here's a bigger problem - India has set a goal to switch to electrical vehicles by 2030. If that happens,…

EVs produce less CO2 than ICEs even when powered by coal plants.
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